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Oct 15, 2018

And that's where the money is: Not in Neymar shirts. It's in TV contracts both domestically and internationally, and it's a paradox that one club pays it, and all others benefit,too (at the expense of minimizing their chances to win a championship, that is). Having Neymar and Mbappé in the league seems to have great effects on the value of the media rights.

We teach companies to become agile as no one can really predict on a 5 or 10 year perspective how the(ir) world will really look like, so there is a need to be able to adapt to the three or four futures that we can think of now, and hope that this applies to the fifth future, too: the one that will actually come. We ourselves should do something similar: become able to adapt to developments that may disrupt the whole fields we are working and living in. That's my key takeaway from GQ's interview with Yuval Noah Harari (the guy who wrote "Sapiens"): There won't be one big disruption because AI will reach some kind of peak, and then a new "order" appears in which we will have to find a position. It will rather be a constant change with constant position-finding required from our side.

Nice article about "the anatomy of a click". Basic explanation of how programmatic works, and why GDPR doesn't really change a thing - once again, either our regulation efforts do not succeed because they are done by people outside the business, or people from inside the business were involved and managed to keep regulation at a level where their basic business is not touched at all. The article explains pretty well what happens when you click on a site that uses programmatic (virtually any publisher nowadays).

Generation Z is so incredibly hard to reach, and even harder to talk to - I mean, with at least some kind of attention on their side - that scientists have set up a channel on Fortnite to talk about climate change. That's desperate on so many levels.

Most publishers have moved to subscriptions, and besides learning how to deal with users as clients instead of readers, one key task is to balance the interest of making a visitor a subscriber/increase loyalty of a subscriber versus squeezing out the maximum value of one hard-earned visit. The latter means playing out as many ads as possible, trying to increase the number of page or video views per visit, even at the cost of maybe annoying a visitor. The NYT rolled out a new article page in May 2018, with far less clutter, focusing on the subscription side - create a pleasing visit, and at some point this will increase the chances to make someone pay.

But since both areas contribute substantially to revenue, finding the balance between a subscription and ad focus is difficult. The Washington Post is running a user lab that initially tested new journalistic formats and products, but has now taken ads into their portfolio, too: One key to strike the balance may lie in ad formats that are not annoying or intrusive, but still valuable to advertisers. Everyone should have thought of that even before subscriptions were a business.

Oct 9, 2018

A new report full of stats and some research work. They see a 7% growth overall in global sports market, led by esports and followed by football (soccer), and digital media rights as the main growth driver - including OTT. Smartphone (96%) and laptop (84%) are leading daily device usage among 18-34yo, putting television in third place (81%). And they say you basically can't overestimate direct fan relationships for both rights holders and sponsors - didn't need a survey for this .-)

Oct 4, 2018

This is somewhere between an analysis and an opinion piece from Scott Galloway - about Snapchat and Tesla being unable to survive on their own. I found the Snap piece more interesting and more analytical, althuogh it contains a lot of Facebook-bashing, too. His prediction is that either Amazon or Disney will buy the company. His main argument is: who else? I am not sure whether Amazon would need to spend this type of money for reach within generation Z (they surely don't need to spend it for camera/AR technology) and when "DisneyFlix" launches, I think they will rather be targeting me instead of teens.
So here's my take: Why not "the Chinese"? One of the "BAT" triopoly over there may want to increase their US/Europe footprint, they know the type of business inside out, and definitely have the cash to acquire the company (and send Evan into early retirement). It would perfectly reflect the development of the digital economy in the past decade - not only are we running into a (quote) "hunger games economy with four religions", there's a parallel world in China with three religions, too, and they will clash / mix eventually.